It’s the commercial real estate mortgage backed securities market. If everyone doesn’t pay office rent the collateralized debt of those places goes kaput, the security implodes like 2008 and the banking industry goes under.

These CEOs are all invested. They don’t care about productivity, it’s all about saving their investments.

This. I’ve been saying and seeing it since Covid. Offices are half empty. Main street footfall is shrinking. These zones are high premiun rents, owned by REITs and other comercial founds. If they are not occupied and ppl is not consuming on the next door shops, assets value is gone down. More colateral is going to be asked from their lenders. Also, municipalities don’t want to lose population as this can result on less budget from government… Of course they are going to put pressure on their CEO buddies to have spenders back to office.